It’s hard to say on many levels. However, to keep things brief, I’d say that the “Dead Internet Theory” is no longer a theory, but rather… law.
The old internet (small privately hosted websites and blogs, organized in web rings) still exists, and may have more content than ever. It’s just such a small subset of the internet now, and gets ignored by search engines, so it’s hard to find.
Beep boop. No computers in sight, just fellow humans, fellow human! Boop beep!
The fact that you, a human, asked this question, and got a variety of human replies is why I would say no.
I know that the dead internet theory doesn’t say that all internet activity is bots, but certainly the internet that I experience, there is abundant humanity.
However, I am a nerd who inhabits quite niche spaces, so my experience is far from the typical. Having the knowledge and stubbornness to find spaces like this puts me in a kind of bubble, where it’s hard for me to gauge whether we’re actually at the point of “dead internet”.
In all likelihood, my answer is “no”, because I need it to be. I love the internet. I grew up online, and as a very lonely child, the internet was a key part of my identity formation. As an adult, the internet is how I access community and learning. As grim as things are, I think I’m a utopian at heart.
Like I say, I realise that my online experience is far from what most people experience, and I do find it sad that most people probably do experience a much deader internet than I do. But the reason why I’m here, putting time and care into comments like this is because this is one of the ways that I am trying to keep the internet alive. “Dead” is a binary, which suggests the battle is already over. I believe the internet is dying, for sure, but I can’t reconcile the notion of a dead internet with all the vibrant communities of people who are making stuff they care about, in defiance of the slop economy.
Smaller sites like niche phpBB forums are barely hanging on under the tide of spammers and crawlers (AI or otherwise). They don’t have the means to defend against what is effectively a DDoS, and are forced to increase the onboarding friction by requiring an email requesting an account or use other things like CAPTCHA or stoop to using a centralized CDN like Cloudflare.
I’d say we’re not there yet, but yeah, LLMs and image generators have accelerated it to the point, where I expect it to only take a few more years.
Gonna be interesting. There’s definitely going to be some enclaves, like invite-only places (in particular messengers), and potentially the fediverse won’t be worth targeting directly. But we do get lots of second-hand content here from places which are worth targeting, so yeah, will probably still notice the change here in one form or another.
Online communities will need to evolve natural protective features and either become porcupines that are visible but not worth the trouble of botting, or small hidden communities that spread via offline or secondary means, rather than attracting traffic from the web at large. I’m not sure what those communities will look like and it will probably be a pretty rapidly evolving landscape for at least the rest of my natural life.
OR we’ll get our act together and pass some laws or treaties or other broad compacts that make the public internet a usable shared resource. It could happen, but I admit I don’t see the internet’s current trajectory intersecting that possibility for the foreseeable future.
Yes
The best answer I’ve ever received was “yes.” Well summarized and quick.
I feel like it’s worth pointing out that we are really only talking about the World Wide Web (one of several software platforms on the Internet) and not the Internet (the hardware part) as a whole.
Yeh. It’s been a zombie for a long time. Depersonalisation, censorship, monetisation, trackers, bots, inability to search. Everything’s so clinically useless.
I grew up with the knowledge that “Internet routes around damage”. In those days that referred to censorship and walled gardens.
I’m not sure if and how it would work with disinformation and AI slop as the damage to route around of.
I’m cautious but hopeful.
Matter of perspective. Earlier today, I told a coworker how happy I am to have been born in the late 1980’s, because it spared me from the internet culture of today: shallow, exploitative, otherizing and it encourages short term dopamine kicks. It’s a breeding ground for media illiteracy, bigotry, xenophobia and narrow mindedness in general - which is ironic, since it also makes the culminated knowledge of human kind easily accessible, which has the potential to open your mind if you have internet access and if you use the internet wisely. Anyway, in a way, the internet of today is a crystalization of everything that’s making me have a gloomy outlook on the future and keeping me from wanting to have children.
I’m forever privileged to have been part of the crowd that got to know and experience the internet as it developed.
It was a much more colorful and sociable world. It was also a lot quieter, because people mostly kept to themselves and the internet wasn’t 24/7.
There’s a subset of gen z i see sometimes that are jealous we got to live that era. Damn shame the world kids have to grow up in now, no thanks!! So glad we weren’t born any later.
I’m younger than you (born 1995), but I share some of your feelings. The internet today is so different from how I remember it as a kid. I am immensely grateful that I got to experience some of that period of rapid change.
It’s been a reality for quite a while. It’s hard to pinpoint when exactly we started seeing these, but I reckon to guess they didn’t start being a thing until the mid-2010s. We’ve had bots before on the internet, but they were regulated to being more like assistants like on IRC channels or chat rooms. Where their purpose was to be greeters or handle tasks the moderator needed to be automated.
fediverse kinda seems alive tho
It’s like we found a cute little pub down the backstreet. Let the outside fall apart.
I’d love to answer but there’s a Captcha preventing it.
Beep boop boop bop Beep boop boop beep bop Bop
There are places where it’s dead, but also places where it’s flourishing. You just gotta find the greenery among the dead brush IMO. Great time to find blogs/personal websites, and keep track of them via RSS
So much this.
To some extend yes imo. What I do observe is the rising “AI” content, flooding, especially, the social media giants and around.
Bots flooding comment-sections… I’d say things like defederation are one outcome, to somehow fortify against it. Which is totally okay.
